Reminder: look into various musical illusions.
The Wisdom of Emergent Crowds of Tipping Points
I’ve recently finished three books that all have more to do with one another than they might expect:
- Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
- The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
The last one, while not as well written, does acknowledge the space it’s in by referencing the previous two books. (and mentioned our own Dave Pennock)
At some point I want to sit down with all three of these again and write down my slowly gelling thoughts on all of this. This is how we should design software and build robots.
P900 & iSync redux
I once had my P900 working with iSync and stuff but with various updates bluetooth connectivity has gone tits up. I’ve kinda stopped caring and just emailed things on&off the phone when needed. But it looks like others have gotten it working well:
Microchip PIC ZigBee
Microchip (the maker of the über-awesome PIC microcontrollers) have announced a ZigBee stack and dev kit for $199. This makes it over an order-of-magnitude cheaper than other ZigBee devkits. Granted, Microchip’s only comes with two FFD nodes, instead of 7 or 8 like the others, but still…
L’Ennui
A French collegue handed out these chocolates wrapped in paper with pithy french statements on them, like fortune cookies. Mine said “L’ennui naquit un jour de l’uniformité”, which means (i think) “Ennui was born from Uniformity”.
Talk about your apropos fortunes….
BT Research Ambient WiFi light
Sorta like the AmbientDevices stuff,
BT Research’s ambient light uses WiFi instead of pager protocols. And makes noises. Wonder if they’ll ever release it.
ZigBee stuff
ZigBee is a newish RF radio protocol at the same frequency of Bluetooh and 802.11b (ISC 2.4GHz). Unlike both of those protocols, it doesn’t suck (power). It’s meant to sip on batteries for months while still being part of a ZigBee mesh. And it seems to be designed to better deal in noiser environments (which the 2.4GHz band is definitely now).
There’s been at least one article in Circuit Cellar about it, I need to re-read it.